Showing posts with label Computers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Computers. Show all posts

30 October 2007

Holy Frijoles!

I like to browse the blogs over at ZDNet, and I ran across this entry by Robin Harris.

He reports that Professor Guarav Khanna at the University of Massachusetts has clustered 8 Sony Playstation 3s (donated by Sony) to create one supercomputer. Researching his black holes and quantum cosmology cost him $5,000 in grant money on a conventional supercomputer, but for way less than that, one can run whatever complex computations they desire with the supercomputer created out of PS3s.


Picture stolen from ZDNet, please don't sue me!

Awesome!

27 September 2007

It doesn't always pay to be the smart one

I got a call from my brother yesterday. Seems his computer has started giving him a message from Norton Anti-Virus saying he has a "Trojan.Vundo" residing in "C:\Windows\System32\mljigda.dll". Of course, the virus (according to Norton) is over 2 years old, so I suppose this is the reason Norton can't get rid of it. Their website says to download their "FixVundo.exe" file to fix it. I tried to talk him through it on the phone, first by asking him to disconnect his computer from the internet.

Him: "How do I do that?"
Me: "Well, just unplug it from the cable modem."
Him: "How do I do that?"
Me: "Well, you could just unplug the cable modem from the wall."
Him: "What the hell is a cable modem?"

That is when it occurred to me that the only thing he ever does on the computer I think is read his email and do his fantasy sports stuff, and when I knew this was not going to be solved over the phone. He was supposed to bring me his box on Friday, but showed up Wednesday night with it instead. Tonight I plugged it all in, booted into safe mode, and ran the FixVundo app. Nothing. The application said it could not find Vundo virus on the machine. Have I mentioned how much I hate Norton? Personally, I use AVS and have had zero problems with it other than having to manually start the email scanner after every other update. And it is FREE! And it took over two hours to search his machine.

After that, I rebooted into regular windows mode and went to install Ad-Aware (I love ad aware for malware detection). And sure enough, the stupid "you have a virus I can't fix" message comes up, constantly. Click to close it down it alternates messages from "Unable to repair file" to "Access to the file was denied." So I figured I would run the FixVundo in regular mode (completely disconnected from any network, BTW). I start running it, and about 2 minutes into it, I get some debug messages saying the FixVundo is trying to improperly load a C++ library.

Fracking NORTON! I HATE YOU GUYS!!!!

I click through those, and the thing is still running so I'm simultaneously running AdAware (probably not a good idea, but doing it anyway). I'm heading to bed and will just have to see what pops up in the morning.

Have I mentioned how much I dislike the over-priced, bloated resource hog that is Norton Anti-Virus?

AAAAARRRRGGGHHH!!!!

*** 28 September, 2007 - Updated ***
Ok, just to show you that I am not unreasonable in my dislike of Norton Anti-Virus, here is an image from my brother's machine.

Now, please note the bright red box which says "Norton AntiVirus has detected a virus on your computer." You see that? Yeah, that came up just about 30 seconds after the box that said "Trojan.Vundo has not been found on your computer."

30 March 2007

New virus hiding as IE7 download

I'm just trying to spread the word here - I don't do this much, but I believe this to be very important



Trojan masquerades as IE 7 downloads by ZDNet's Ryan Naraine -- Spammers are using fake Internet Explorer 7 (Beta 2) downloads to lure Windows users into downloading a nasty backdoor Trojan. The fake downloads are part of a massive spam run that includes an official-looking graphic (see image below) linked to Web sites that auto-launch an executable named "ie7.exe." A copy of this spam that landed in my [...]



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